Yvonne Rainer Retrospective

THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN
Year:  1985, Color

The Man Who Envied Women sees Rainer, in her own words, “throw down the gauntlet to psychoanalytic feminist film theory,” interrogating and responding to contemporary debates over notions such as the male gaze with a drolly provocative hybrid essay film. Rainer’s account of the break-up of a marriage between a womanizing blowhard Manhattan professor (played alternately by William Raymond and Larry Loonin) and his artist wife, who exists only as voice-over (choreographer Trisha Brown), soon galaxy brains outwards to address concerns as divergent as the housing crisis facing New York artists and political struggles in Latin America.

(Synopsis courtesy of The Metrograph)

YVONNE RAINER

A pioneering figure of the avant garde movement, Yvonne Rainer’s artistic career spans over five decades across both dance and film. Making use of archives, reenactments, photographs, and unconventional audiovisual techniques, her films draw on critical theory and erudite analysis while exploring deeply personal, political, and social themes. Her genre-defining work and collaboration with other artists has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Rockefeller Fellowships, among other accolades. Rainer is widely regarded as one of the most influential performance artists of the twentieth century; as critic J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice in 1986, “Rainer is the avant-garde’s most important woman filmmaker since Maya Deren…more likely, she’s the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”

Coming Soon

PRIVILEGE
Year:  1990, Color/B&W

“For Rainer, drama and style aren’t innocent, and the very concept of a story, and the way it’s told, is political”—Richard Brody

One of Rainer’s most narratively complex films, Privilege shifts from a documentary about women going through the process of menopause to a deadpan and delightfully anarchic autobiographical meta-film exploring the power dynamics underpinning experience, memory, and the manner in which women’s stories are told.

(Synopsis courtesy of The Metrograph)

YVONNE RAINER

A pioneering figure of the avant garde movement, Yvonne Rainer’s artistic career spans over five decades across both dance and film. Making use of archives, reenactments, photographs, and unconventional audiovisual techniques, her films draw on critical theory and erudite analysis while exploring deeply personal, political, and social themes. Her genre-defining work and collaboration with other artists has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Rockefeller Fellowships, among other accolades. Rainer is widely regarded as one of the most influential performance artists of the twentieth century; as critic J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice in 1986, “Rainer is the avant-garde’s most important woman filmmaker since Maya Deren…more likely, she’s the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”

Coming Soon

MURDER and murder
Year:  1996, Color

Rainer’s last feature is also one of her most personal, inspired by the lows and highs of a breast cancer diagnosis in the early 1990s, and the surprise of a burgeoning lesbian relationship. The latter is playfully refracted here through the love story of two women from very different backgrounds: Yvonne’s sixty-something screen counterpart Doris (Joanna Merlin) who gleefully announces that she “loves eating pussy,” and the younger academic she’s soon to move in with, Mildred (Kathleen Chalfant). A comic romance whose emotions are amplified by Rainer’s structural tomfoolery and signature intellectual rigor—with the director providing running commentary and appearing intermittently to address the camera—MURDER and murder probes the pleasures, and attendant questions, of late-in-life love affairs.

(Synopsis courtesy of The Metrograph)

YVONNE RAINER

A pioneering figure of the avant garde movement, Yvonne Rainer’s artistic career spans over five decades across both dance and film. Making use of archives, reenactments, photographs, and unconventional audiovisual techniques, her films draw on critical theory and erudite analysis while exploring deeply personal, political, and social themes. Her genre-defining work and collaboration with other artists has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Rockefeller Fellowships, among other accolades. Rainer is widely regarded as one of the most influential performance artists of the twentieth century; as critic J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice in 1986, “Rainer is the avant-garde’s most important woman filmmaker since Maya Deren…more likely, she’s the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”

Coming Soon